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OXFORD PAMPHLETS 

,^^ S 1914-1915 

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THE 

EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 
IN MODERN FRANCE 

BY 

ERNEST DIMNET 

Price Tivopence net 



OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

HUMPHREY MILFORD 

UONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW 

NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY 



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THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 
m MODERN FRANCE 

The object of the following pages is to account for the 
present state of public opinion and of national feeling in 
France by tracing them to their historic causes. 

A war is one of the greatest trials that a nation can 
undergo : it taxes all its energies and possibilities and 
reveals its moral condition exactl}^ as a great sentimental 
or intellectual crisis reveals the latent power or the 
unsuspected weakness of individuals. Under difficult 
circumstances of this kind a man not only acts but 
speaks in a manner which, whether to his credit or to his 
disgrace, proclaims the principles or the fallacies on which 
he has lived so far. 

It is unquestionable that France has borne the brunt of 
the declaration of war, of the trying first weeks which 
followed, and of the slow months which elapsed after the 
battle of the Marne, in a manner which even her enemies 
must have admired, and which they probably did not 
expect. If you refer to the Yellow Paper [Livre Jaune) 
published in December 1914 by the French Government, 
you will find that the Germans had long cherished the 
idea that France was a decaying nation. 

Were there traces of a similar notion, more or less 
conscious and reasoned, outside of Germany ? It is 
impossible to deny it. Everybody must have met people 
who were surprised, even if they were delighted, to see 
France giving evidence of complete self-possession and 
following without effort the guidance of her best leaders. 



4 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

Everybody must also remember meeting people who pro- 
tested against this surprise and stated emphatically that 
they had always believed in the French nation, had never 
consented to look upon the French as modern Graeculi (the 
Greeks of the decadence) or, as a famous writer once said 
even less politely, as the monkeys in the European jungle. 
Such differences of opinion can never be altogether 
unfounded ; and the inference which a logical person who 
knew nothing of French history in the last four or five de- 
cades would draw could only be that conflicting tendencies 
must have been at work in French society. This con- 
clusion is correct. Since 1870, the date when France, 
defeated b}^ Germany, weakened furthermore by the 
Commune, and exhausted financially by the ransom 
(£200;000,000) she had to pay down to her conquerors, was 
left to heal her wounds as best she could — there have been 
two currents in French thought, consequently also in 
French morals, and according as observers ha]3pened to 
take note of one or the other, their impression was one of 
disgust or on the contrary of hopefulness. 

Most people who followed the trend of French thought 
between the years 1876-95 were pessimistic. It is true 
that during the first five years after the war France 
gave a marvellous example of vitality. In those few 
years she managed to pay off the Germans who occupied 
her fortified towns along the eastern frontier, and she 
accomplished such a thorough reform of her military 
arrangements (keeping her soldiers under the colours for 
five years, rapidl}^ improving her armament, and copying 
intelligently the organization of her enemies), that 
Bismarck became nervous and was for picking another 
quarrel the result of which must he her final destruction. 

But this effort was the combination of a great national 



IN MODERN FRANCE 5 

impulse with the leadership of a politician who frequently 
came near to being a great statesman, M. Thiers, the first 
President of the Republic, It left the ideas of philoso- 
phers, scientists, literary people, journalists, and generally 
the so-called thinking circles where they were ; and these 
ideas were practically the same which prevailed ten years 
before, under the Second Empire. Now, the ideas in the 
air during the Second Empire were not conducive to 
moral health. Nobody will deny that the most in- 
fluential authors of that period were Hugo, Leconte de 
Lisle, Baudelaire, Michelet, Quinet, George Sand, 
Flaubert, the Goncourts, Dumas, and — among the more 
philosophic writers — Littre, Auguste Comte, Taine, and 
Renan. I know that besides these names others could be 
mentioned — Caro, Veuillot, Lacordaire, Montalembert, 
0. Feuillet, for instance — which would point to a different 
direction of thought ; but it will be found that none of 
them is really representative, and that their celebrity 
either did not last, or only came, as in the case of Veuillot, 
long after the writer's death, or w^as confined to a small 
section of the public. In fact when we ask ourselves 
who w^ere the Prophets of that day, as an accurate and 
instructive critic, M. Guerarcl, calls them, it is the list 
I first gave that inevitably occurs. 

Now, one general characteristic of those writers is that, 
when compared with the best-known English writers of 
the middle Victorian period, they strike us at once as being 
what is called advanced. This expression is probably 
taken froni the military vocabulary. Some people have 
a way of thinking which immediately suggests the van- 
guard of an army, or even its forlorn hope. And there 
is something invariably attractive in that position ; 
originality, daring, contempt for ready-made notions, all 
imply brilliance and at first sight a quality akin to courage. 

A2 



6 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

It is only on second thoughts we realize that, given 
certain conditions of the mental atmosphere, it requires 
no mean courage to be on the conservative or prudent 
side ; that there is little danger in running the gauntlet of 
criticism when one has popularity on one's side ; and 
that we all, more or less, have occasionally notions which 
we know are brilliant and might be dazzling if we chose 
to give them expression, but which, as Charlotte Bronte 
said, we feel we had better keep to ourselves. 

In fact all those famous writers appear to-day to have 
been unduly advanced on some points, and several of 
them (as I shall have occasion to repeat) became aware 
of it themselves. 

To begin with the philosophers, it was a good thing to 
rise above the shallow eclecticism of Cousin, who imagined 
he could build a philosophy by borrowing a bit from one 
philosopher, a bit from another, or above the Scottish 
School, who never went beyond psychology ; and it was 
more than advisable to take into account all the positive 
facts and laws ascertained by modern science before 
endeavouring to lay down metaphysical principles : all 
this Littre, Comte and Taine did with much method, 
erudition, insight, and, one may even say, with genius. 
But it is no less true that to=day these philosophers ap^Dear 
not only belated but hurtful. They disbelieved all 
spiritual realities, and the result was that crude readers 
inferred materialism from their works. Thousands of so- 
called positivists of all degree denied the existence of the 
soul because Littre and Taine said that soul-phenomena 
were not scientifically ascertainable, or the existence of 
free-will because Taine had written that ' virtue and vice 
are products like sugar or vitriol ', an irrefutable state- 
ment when properly understood, but dangerously easy 
to misunderstand. 



IN MODERN FRANCE 7 

Renan also was a rarely gifted man, not only as a writer 
of terse graceful French, a thinker of agile if somewhat 
too flexible intelligence, but even as a scholar and an 
exponent of what used to be called in those days the 
Higher Criticism. But admirably equipped as he was, he 
had serious shortcommgs which to-day make him appear 
strangely out of date. He thought that science could 
explain— and with respect to religious questions explain 
away — everything. He had an easy jaunty manner of 
treating Christianity and even Theism as poetic beliefs 
born of deep instincts of the human soul, which, fear- 
lessly analysed, turned out to be only the mythical 
expression of these instincts ; God was merel}^ a con- 
venient word, the resurrection of Christ was a legend 
created by love, and His divinity was the metaphysical 
translation of similar legends. All this sounded dis- 
tinguished and final ; and the result was that belief 
appeared uncritical and undeveloped. As a matter of 
fact it took years of reconsideration of the same questions 
to enable a man like Dr. Sanday, for instance, who knows 
a great deal more about Biblical criticism than was 
known in Renan 's day, to be respected as a scholar 
though speaking as a believer. One had to be advanced 
or to be regarded as a fossil. 

Some people would occasionally observe that these 
doctrines might be scientific but their immediate effect 
was morally depressing and even deteriorating. If it was 
not certain that there was a divine influence in the world 
or a spiritual substance in man, if there was no free-will 
and we were the jdI ay things of fatality, what was the use 
of a great deal that had hitherto been held indispensable 
to good living and happy dying ? Of this objection 
Taine disposed at once with the greatest ease : specula- 
tion and life were different things, as art and our ever}'- 



8 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

day avocations are. different ; when the philosopher set 
about philosophizing his duty was to forget that there 
were people who might overhear his inward reflections. 
Philosophy was autonomous even if it was dispiriting, 
and its effects were mere contingencies. 

This view had considerable vogue not only among 
scientists and savants, but even among literary people 
who claimed for art the rights which philosophy asserted 
for itself. The famous formula, Vart pour Vart, for which 
the Goncourt brothers were responsible, but which 
accounts admirably for the literary attitude of Flaubert, 
or Leconte de Lisle, was a translation of the same doctrine : 
the artist had every right to describe what he pleased, in 
any way he pleased, provided he did it artistically ; moral 
or immoral consequences were nothing to him. All this 
tended, as may easily be seen, to isolate thinkers and 
writers, and all those who thought themselves entitled to 
imitate them, from their time, country, and fellow beings 
in the sole company of what was declared to be Truth or 
Beauty. A perilous state of affairs, this, in which the 
supposed sages of a nation profess indifference to the 
interests of their country. 

It is needless to say much about the advanced character 
of the works of George Sand, Dumas, and Baudelaire. 
The first two writers practically taught that passion is 
only accountable to itself and that the desires of man 
when they reach a certain intensity overrule the ordinary 
canons of morals ; the third was a morbid decadent 
who even now defies analysis. As to Hugo, Quinet, and 
Michelet, at the stage of their career which corresponds to 
the Second Empire, they were, above all, humanitarians 
who loved all mankind — ^with the exception of Catholics, 
whom they abhorred — and firmly believed in the prompt 
establishment of the United States of Europe. 



IN MODERN FRANCE 9 

The catastroplie of 1870, which showed to the French 
that the United States of Europe was a rather pre- 
mature conception, and demonstrated that courage, 
self-denial, and the virtues without which a nation 
must go to ruin are inconsistent with materialism, 
ought to have brought about a revulsion of feeling 
and of thought. It did produce this result in a few- 
eminent , individuaJs ; and until 1876 the country at 
large, owing to its Government, appeared to have 
gone back to sound principles. But after 1876 the 
outlook changed rapidly. The masses began, to forget 
the formidable lesson they had received a few j^ears 
before, and the newly elected representatives of the 
country were very different from their predecessors. 
Where the difference lay was not very difficult to see. 
Most of these men had been students in Paris during 
the Second Empire, and their intellectual background 
was generally that which I have described above. 
Their philosophers were Taine or Haeckel, their theo- 
logian was Renan ; the novels they had read were 
those of George Sand, the plays they had applauded 
were those of Dumas ; they had believed in the United 
States of Europe, and imagined that the establishment 
of the French Republic was a first step towards the 
pacification of the world. The consequence was that 
the advanced doctrines which, in 1865, were confined 
to books, were found ten years after to underlie the 
Government of the country and to be paramount in 
the formation of the public spirit. 

An objection must rise in the mind of the English 
reader : is it possible that literature, which after all is 
only the solace of idle hours, should have so much 
influence on the trend of public affairs ? and is it not 
a fact that numberless French people were to be found, 



10 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

under the Second Empire and long after, whose mtel- 
lectual preferences had never been tainted by these 
dangerous principles ? 

It should be remembered that the French have 
a tendency hardly found in the other European nations, 
and seldom met with in England, to be carried away 
by their intellectual notions ; all their popular move- 
ments, all their Revolutions were made in accordance 
with theories recklessly acted upon. A great deal of 
the fascination which the French nation exercised, 
along with the dread it inspired in Europe during the 
twenty years which followed 1789, arose from this 
uncompromising enthusiasm about ideas and consequent 
propagandism. 

On the other hand, it is a fact that many French 
people ignored or disliked the popular writers who are 
representative of the Second Empire ; they had con- 
servative views in morals and often in religion, and 
many a foreigner must have been surprised at finding 
them so remote from the type he imagined. All this 
is true. But it is a law of history that a country is 
moulded by its Government, because most individuals 
are passive, and even when they are not so, do not 
easily discover the means of raising a protest ; the 
press is on the side of the majority, and makes it the 
more difficult for the dissenting few to express their 
feelings. 

In fact it is impossible to contradict two statements 
concerning the historical development of France during 
the last forty years, which bear out the principles 
I have just recalled. In the first place, it is universally 
admitted that the eight or nine Chambers which succeeded 
one another since 1876 were advanced. Their philosophy 
was not only anti-clerical — that is to say, opposed to the 



IN MODERN FRANCE 11 

interference of churchmen in civil affairs where they 
have no business — but it was anti-catholic and even 
anti-christian. These Parliaments suppressed religious 
orders and confiscated their property, they denounced 
the Concordat with the Pope, sent back his ambassador, 
and finally confiscated the Church property, aU which 
was anti-catholic. But they also favoured and occasion- 
ally enforced methods of education which regarded the 
mention of God in schools as a breach of ' neutrality ' ; 
in 1902 the Premier Combes was hooted down by his 
majority for saying that he believed in the soul, and he 
had to explain and practically apologize for his words. 
This, no doubt, showed a hostility to Christianity ob- 
viously born of the philosophy of Taine and Renan. 

In the second place, it is also impossible to deny 
that many people scattered all over the world regarded 
France as a decaying nation, and Paris as a centre of 
corruption. AUusions to this belief were frequent in 
the press of most countries. How did this notion come 
to be spread about to that extent ? It was owing largely, 
no doubt, to the existence in Paris of scandalous places 
of amusement, ivhich catered 7nostly for foreign visitors 
but which were regarded as representative. There was 
certainly a considerable amount of injustice or exaggera- 
tion in the notion that France was mirrored in its 
capital, and Paris in its worst theatres. But on the 
other hand, it would be futile to gainsay that the great 
novelist of the years 1875 to 1895 was Zola, and the 
great novelist of the years 1890-1905 Anatole France ; 
and the popularity of these two men was not likely 
to decrease the impression left by the licentiousness 
I have just spoken of. 

Zola was a talented, industrious man, with a curious 
sense of literary responsibility united to a complete 



12 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

absence of decency. His object, like that of the Realists 
before him, was to be true to life, and his ambition 
was to make his description of society so accurate 
that philosophical laws could be immediately deduced 
from it. Balzac, who towered above him as an artist, 
had cherished the same hope, and we do not feel that 
he succeeded. The laws of the moral world have 
been obscured rather than emphasized by dramatists 
and novelists ; and it was not until the nineteenth cen- 
tury that people went to them for the ethical guidance 
which they sadly need themselves. As a matter of fact, 
Zola, in spite of his philosophical pretensions, only 
produced a one-sided picture of the lowest society ; if 
one went by his thirtj^ volumes it v/ould seem as if 
there were only one class in France, and all the repre- 
sentatives of that class were vicious. But he was 
unequalled in his particular genre, and Anatole France 
could say with mock admh'ation that nobody had been 
able to heap up such a dunghill. The result of Zola's 
success was double : it confirmed the French in the 
outspokenness they frequently affect, and it convinced 
foreigners that a nation which they supposed to be 
represented by such a writer was in a very bad way. 

Anatole France, whose success pushed Zola into the 
shade, is apparently very different from the latter. 
He is supremely exquisite, dainty, and light-handed, 
with dashes of cynicism which lend to his elegance 
something akin to force ; he has knowledge and intelli- 
gence, he is merciful to human weaknesses and full of 
pity for sorrow. But all these fascmating appearances 
do not prevent him from being fundamentally only 
another Zola. The brutes whom Zola depicted were 
automata submitted to the laws of a world in which 
physical instincts reign supreme ; but so are the flitting 



IN MODERN FRANCE 13 

figures which Anatole France's crayons sketch so deftly. 
Anatole France does not believe in goodness any more 
than Zola does. There is a great deal of suffering in 
his works, and suffering seems to be morally superior 
to selfishness ; but the writer shows us all the time 
that this is nothing but a delusion and that people in 
anguish are as selfish as their luckier fellows. The 
scale of. moral values is absent from this view of the 
world, and the absence gradually appeared with deplor- 
able clearness in Anatole France : there are people, even 
in England — I might say especially in England at the 
present day — who will not have it said Anatole France 
has become a rather coarse Socialist, thinking no more 
of patriotism than of virtue, and making game of the 
principles without which nations as v»^ell as individuals 
can have no self-respect. But facts are facts, and if 
anybody wants to understand how Anatole France 
could, three months before the w^ar, sign an anti-militarist 
poster which the Germans must have read with delight, 
let him refer to The Island of the Penguins. 

That the same deterioration was visible in thousands 
of Anatole France's admirers is also a fact. Frenchmen, 
when they have nothing better to do, love the affectation 
of cynicism or scepticism which disports itself in their 
literature from the fabliaux to Renan, and fills the 
works of Rabelais and Voltaire. They long gave way 
to that propensity ; and the serious-minded observer 
who casually saw them smile and joke about the past, 
present, and future of their history could hardly refrain 
from pronouncing the verdict : a decaying nation. 

These, then, are the symptoms which struck the people 
whom I described at the beginning of this essay as 
unable to conceal their surprise at the energy displayed 
by France in her hour of trial. 



14 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

We should now advert to the symptoms which led 
others, more sanguine or better-informed students of 
France, to the conviction that she was sound at heart. 

First of all one ought to remember that a country 
cannot be judged exclusively, or even mainly, by its 
literature. Literature is not so artificial as the theatre, 
because its field is wider, but it is far, all the same, 
from being the adequate expression of a community. 
The fact is that the bulk of the French nation was 
ignorant of, or averse to, the philosophy implied in the 
literature which scandalized the rest of the world. 
Foreigners who happened to stay in Paris — to say 
nothing of less sophisticated towns — long enough to 
see with their own eyes frequently expressed their 
surprise at finding the French home so different from 
the descriptions of the novelists. It took more time 
or more penetration to satisfy oneself that the affecta- 
tion of scepticism or cynicism common in certain circles 
was only an affectation which any opportunity for 
seriousness could dispel ; yet some people had a chance 
of coming to that certainty, and must have taken it as 
a matter of course when Zola came forward as a champion 
of morals, or more recently when Anatoie France spoke 
up for patriotism : books were books and life was lif^ 
— give a man a chance to rise above the dalliances of 
literature and he would be sure to act decently. 

Still, literature is in one way a necessity. At a pinch 
a man will act on his impulses, and books will have 
but little share in his decisions ; but in more peaceful 
periods our intellect craves formulas, and according 
to the tendency visible in such formulas a country will, 
in its daily life, make for idealism or for materialism, 
for courage or for indulgence. If there had been no 



IN MODERN FRANCE 15 

traces between 1870 and the present ddij of wliat, in 
default of a better word, we must call a reaction, France 
might with good reason be called a decadent nation. 
But not only were such traces visible, thej were dominant 
in the most important realms of human activity; and 
there is no exaggeration in saying that the characteristic 
of contemporary French thought is its strong reactionary 
tendency. 

It is remarkable that two of the writers whom 
I pointed out above as representing the speculative 
recklessness of the Second Empire actualty refuted 
their own theories. These two Avriters are no others 
than Taine and Renan, and it is useless to dwell on 
the importance of a change in such influential authors. 
I do not mean that Taine gave up his philosophj^ or 
Renan his criticism : a man seldom remodels his intel- 
lectual equipment after he is forty ; but both Taine 
and Renan adopted after the war a completely different 
attitude towards life from that which they had shown 
before. Their conviction was that, being philosophers, 
their sole business was to philosophize, and that the 
consequences of their philosophy did not matter ; if 
the conclusion of their speculations was that patriotism 
was a remnant of barbarism, let those who heard of 
that conclusion act as their conscience dictated. The 
double catastrophe of the defeat and the Commune 
staggered this security ; the author of U Intelligence 
and the author of UAvenir de la Science had it brought 
home to them that, in spite of their long years of intel- 
lectual aloofness, thej^ belonged to a community of 
men and not of pure spirits, and for the first time the 
civic instinct was awakened in them. The results 
are well known. Taine devoted the rest of his life 
to the eleven volumes of his Origines de la France 



16 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

contemporaine, and Renan summed up his reflections 
on politics in La Reforme intellectuelle et morale cle la 
France ; and lo ! these great works of the once advanced 
writers were not advanced at all ; they were, on the 
contrary, resolutely conservative. Both historians 
showed the same distrust of vague aspirations as 
political motives and of democracy as a government. 
Both preferred the English habit of patching up to 
the French way of pulling down and rebuilding. Both 
regarded the Revolution as a failure, and modern 
demagogism as a form of cowardice. They stood for 
order, morals, and self-sacrifice as the basis of politics 
worth the name. 

It is not exceptional to meet, even to-day, with 
people who, preferring the ideas of Taine and Renan 
in their first development to those which they after- 
wards advocated, resent any mention of the change 
I have just noticed. Such people, of course, do not 
count intellectually ; had they come across Taine or 
Renan they would have promptly secured the con- 
tempt of two minds which never tried to get away 
from facts. But, unintelligent narrow^-mindedness is 
not universal, and the readers of Taine's Origines and 
Renan' s Reforme were deeply impressed. There is no 
doubt that the conservative tendency which has become 
more and more noticeable in favourite writers like 
Jules Lemaitre, Faguet, Capus, Prevost, and hundreds 
of their imitators can be traced, if not to Taine's or 
Renan's evolution, at least to the altered attitude 
created by that evolution : literary people began to 
take an active interest in politics, and they paid more 
attention to tangible results than to theories, or, above 
all, to eloquent declamations. The hostility to the 
professional politician, which is a great feature of the 



IN MODERN FRANCE 17 

young generation, has come down to them from Taine 
and Renan in a direct line. 

As I said above, Taine and Renan never reconsidered 
their philosophy. They went on believing that all 
phenomena, being reducible to material causes and 
effects, could be traced by science to their farthest 
origins. The consequence of this doctrine was double : 
first of all it was a denial of the necessity of faith, seeing 
that there were no mysteries, and furthermore it was 
a denial of God. So belief in science was associated 
with complete religious incredulity. Crude minds, 
which are always anxious to appear free from trammels, 
affected exceedingly scientific principles. 

Experience alone would have been enough to explode 
the scientific fallacy : Pasteur said that the deeper he 
went, the more difficult the discovery of causes became ; 
and everybody must notice, as well as this great man, 
that the riddle of the universe was no nearer its solution 
in the nineteenth century than it was in the days of 
Aristotle. But the belief in science, which was a dogma 
with Taine, was denounced by men who were not Taine's 
inferiors either as savants or as philosophers. Only 
specialists know the names of M. Lachelier and M. Bou- 
troux, but everybody knew the name of Brunetiere, who 
went round proclaiming the ' bankruptcy of science ', 
and most people who count came to hear of the famous 
mathematician Poincare, and especially of the famous 
philosopher Bergson, who at the present moment is by 
far the most successful exponent of his specialit}^ And 
what is the gist of Bergson 's teaching ? the very reverse 
of Taine's : it is the multiform affirmation that science 
is a mere construction of the intellect and that we have 
no guarantee of its accuracy ; it is, moreover, an affirma- 
tion that there is a spiritual element in man and in the 



18 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

world for which physics or biology can never account. 
This of course provided a sufficient basis for religion : 
belief, in M. Bergson's philosophy, is an eminently 
scientific attitude. So is patriotism, for it is another 
great feature of Bergsonism that it has more respect for 
man's instincts than for his intelligence. 

On the whole, we can say that French science and 
philosophy are no longer antagonistic to the idea of 
free-will, morals, and religion, and the rare champions 
of materialism seem curiously out of date. 

Literature shows a transformation of the same kind. 
Towards 1880 Zola was the undisputed master of the 
novel, and Naturalism, i.e. a coarser form of Realism, 
was triumphant ; but it was the end of its success. A 
young writer who could not be called a man of genius, 
but who was sensitive and capable of delicate intuitions, 
Paul Bourget, felt that the public had been surfeited with 
brutality, and that there was a chance for a kind of 
fiction which would make more room for the soul than 
for the body. His success was immediate and universal. 
In less than five years, Zola appeared not only indecent 
but inartistic, and, what is even more damning, false. 
People began to shrug their shoulders at a view of life 
which presented men and women as mere automata 
acting under animal impulses. Nobody questioned any 
more that, even in a self-indulgent society, instinct is 
not the universal law and that even the lowest types 
of humanity know doubts and struggles. This meant 
the restoration of the moral element, of respect for 
sacrifice and contempt for selfishness in literature. 
Bourget's characters were weak, but he knew it, and they 
themselves confessed it : this was enough to dispel the 
stifling atmosphere which Zola's school had gathered 
around life. 



IN MODERN FRANCE 19 

In the last thirty years realism has certainly not died 
out, and we ought to be grateful, for realism rightly 
understood means nothing else than the search after 
human verity ; but the success of Bourget, Bazin, Bor- 
deaux, more recently of E. Psichari and E. Clermont, 
in the novel, also the immense su]3eriority of F. de Curel 
on the stage, show clearly that the French once more 
include manifestations of the soul in their notion of 
the real. 

Anatole France had his share in Zola's defeat : the 
terse criticism of Zola's inspiration which I quoted above 
soon became a household word ; but example is stronger 
than any criticism, and Anatole France's novels did 
more than his generally overpraised critical Avorks to 
rid French literature of cumbersome Naturalism. This 
statement may seem at first sight to contradict what 
I said above of the essential similarity between the 
spirit of both Anatole France and Zola's novels, but 
it is only an appearance. With the average reader 
style counts less than matter, and to such a one Le Lys 
rouge may be more dangerous than La Terre ; but with 
artists it is not so . Anatole France is a Materialist and 
a Socialist in his spirit, but in his manner he is a story- 
teller in the most charming French tradition, with a dis- 
dain for what the Romanticists and the Naturalists called 
force, but which was mostly bombast, and a partialit}^ 
for clarity, elegance, gracefulness, wit, and generally the 
literary qualities which the world, not so long ago, 
regarded as eminently French. It was by these qualities, 
above all, that Anatole France became contagious ; and 
the consequence was that the hundreds of young writers 
who in the last twenty years have more or less felt his 
influence or that of his own masters — Renan first and 
the French classics afterwards — are generally French, 



20 THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 

not only in manner but in spirit, and impress us by an 
independence towards foreign sources of judgement or 
impression which is a highly conscious form of patriotism. 
Conscious as it is, this patriotism is not always explicit : 
the writer thinks it superfluous to dwell on what he 
supposes the reader will feel. Yet there is a literary 
school of rare fascination which has made it its business 
to brace up the French public by the frank expression 
of a patriotism so resolute as to appear sometimes 
narrow. The name of Maurice Barres is not universally 
kno^vn in England, but no name is so popular in France, 
and it is synonymous with a passionate love of the 
French soil and the French tradition. The story of 
Barres' evolution has been frequently told, and can be 
summed up in a few words. Towards 1890, when Barres, 
then a very young man, first made his mark, there was no 
question of regarding him as an apostle of anything except 
pleasure. But it was pleasure of a refined and almost 
exalted kind, the sensation of full self-realization much 
more than any other. A theory of life underlay this 
attitude, which Barres was not long in developing. He 
knew that the highest pleasure for a man was the 
consciousness that he was himself, but the conscious- 
ness of being oneself, he, like everybody who has led 
a spiritual life, soon realized was associated with the 
environment in which each one of us has grown up : 
a man was the most himself in his own country, sur- 
rounded with familiar associations, and in the constant 
enjoyment of the sentimental or intellectual heritage 
left to him by his ancestors. This very simple observa- 
tion is no novelty to a plain man brought up away from 
the sophistication of modern philosophy ; but it struck 
the ultra-refined generation of Barres as a discovery, 
and its development led to the extraordinary success, 



IN MODERN FRANCE 21 

first of all of literary Nationalism, but also of Nationalism 
without any reference to literature. Thousands of 
volumes in the past twenty years have expressed the joy 
of their authors at feeling themselves in community 
with the historic tradition of their countr}^, and there 
are hardlj^ any French works of this period in which the 
reflection of the same consciousness does not appear. As 
this kind of literature became more successful it also 
became freed of its original selfishness ; and while we have 
seen it reach to the expression of self-sacrifice in the 
works of a grandson of Renan, Ernest Psichari, we have 
also seen it attain to the perfection of its effect, in the 
death of the same Psichari; killed on the battle-field at 
the beginning of the war, and in the life of admirable 
self-denial which Barres himself has led of late years. 

The reader must now see for himself what a gulf there 
is between the unreality of the humanitarianism preached 
by Michelet and the wide-awake attention of Nationalism 
to the destinies of France : between the sombre stoicism 
which Naturalism was at its best, or the cynicism it 
was at its worst, and the brave optimism of most con- 
temporary writers. Bearing in mind the transformation 
I have just outlined, it is easy to understand how 
shocking any mention of France as a corrupt and decay- 
ing nation must have been to people who really knew 
what path the national genius had followed in the last 
thirty years. They realized that France was more 
French than she had been since the early days of 
Napoleon I, when militarism, yet in its glorious youth, 
had not become tjn^annical, and they felt that only 
an occasion was lacking to reveal the wonderful reju- 
venation. 

The occasion, of course, was the war ; but the war only 



22 EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE 

took by surprise the ignorant or the thoughtless. In 
1905, in 1908, especially in 1911, the French nation had 
known the suspense which filled the last week of July 
1914 ; and if in 1905 there had been more astonishment 
than fear at the prospect of an encounter with Germany, 
in 1908 and in 1911 there was neither astonishment nor 
nervousness. Anybody who knew the trend both of the 
better literature and of popular feeling must have realized 
that when the crisis came France would surely be 
equal to it. There was no likelihood of any differences 
between the soldier-workman and the soldier-writer 
of the Peguy or Psichari type. In fact both classes of 
men appear to be in perfect unanimity, not because of 
the overwhelming pressure of the circumstances, but 
because the war found them in possession of the best 
national characteristics, which are clear intelligence on 
one hand and cheerful decision on the other. It would 
be foolish to hope that this unbroken unity will perse- 
vere after the peace ; the politicians who, at the Radical 
Convention of April 1914, almost on the eve of the war, 
insisted on reducing the French Army by a third, out 
of spite against President Poincare even more than in 
accordance with pacificist theories, will not be shamed 
out of existence : we must expect to hear once more vague 
declamations as soon as pressing facts which demand 
prompt action can be pushed into the background ; but 
professional politicians nov/here represent the popula- 
tions they deceive, and French thought, in the plain 
conversation of the peasant as well as in the writings 
of the literary man, will be healthier than it was during 
six or seven generations. 



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